The field trial, conducted over an existing 410km fibre link between the BT Tower in London and BT's Adastral Park research campus in Suffolk, reached speeds of 1.4 terabits per second.

Australia has an average internet download speed of 4.8 megabits per second, according to Akamai's state of the internet report — about 300,000 times slower than Alcatel-Lucent and BT's connection.

Faster internet speeds have been measured in labs, but the latest trial is the first time such a fast connection has been achieved using "real world" conditions.

The trial used a new "flexible grid" infrastructure to vary the gaps between transmission channels, which allowed more efficient data transmission.

Kevin Drury, optical marketing leader at Alcatel-Lucent, told BBC News that the new development was akin to reducing the spaces between lanes on a busy highway, enabling more lanes of traffic to share the same space.